The New White Nancy

Twas a lovely morning so we left mum at home and took a hike up to White Nancy to check out the new paint job.

First rest point ...

Elaine bonding with the friendly cows on the way up ...

Second rest break ...

And there she is the new paint job ... to celebrate the 200th Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.

(White Nancy was built in 1817 to commemorate the victory at The Battle of Waterloo).

Elaine nearly at the top ...

The views today were superb, it was the clearest day we have had up there ...

You could clearly see Manchester which is twenty miles away.  Between us, we managed to drop the camera once more and developed a black spot inside the lens for the ensuing photos ...

Bolly village ...

Our main memory of Bollington will be its fantastic location  surrounded by stunning hills, oh and the Spinners pub across the road!

Marvellous Macc Moorings.

Macclesfield used to be one of the most user -UNfriendly places to moor on the whole canal system - the moorings were run down, it was too  shallow to get close to the bank the rings were non existent, they were a right mess..........

Not Any "Moor" !!!

They have installed some really nice floating pontoon moorings next to bridge 37 ...

They are well and truly anchored to the bank ...

Depending on the length of boats you can probably get about 6 boats on them ...

All the continuous moorers have been cleared off the opposite bank so there is plenty of room for boats to pass ...

You can still moor on the other side of bridge 37, but the mooring there are pretty rough.  You may well have a run in with the grumpy bastard that lives here ... he still has his cameras trained on the mooring (there are two cameras positioned around this back gate) and is an absolute nutter!  You can read about the run in we had with him back in May 2012  here.

So now there is a really nice place to moor up and check out a really nice town.  It is still a small hike to the town centre, but well worth it.

N.B. Macclesfield council paid me very little for this blog post! 

Mow Cop Castle

Mow Cop Castle is a popular destination for the boater travelling along the Macclesfield canal, however it is a fair walk from the canal up to Mow Cop.  We never walked up there when we had the boat, so today we decided to drive up there.

We had mother with us so on the way there we stopped at Astbury Mere at Congleton, where we could take her on a flat walk around the lake ... she is 84 and doesn't do hills very well!

We spotted this chap going home from his day's fishing for sticklebacks ...

Can you believe all the crap they take with them, and he wears camo!!

After we tired out dear old mum we headed up the the Mow Cop Folly ...

You get a most fantastic view of the Cheshire Plain from atop the Cop ...

The clouds looked threatening but it was actually quite warm (ish) ...

The folly was built in 1754 ...

Bombo stared at the folly in total awe!

Searching For Tarts!

As there were a couple of viewings of the cottage today we thought we would make ourselves scarce and go looking for tarts.

...40 mins later we arrived at Bakewell, home of the tart.

One of the bridges crossing the river has been covered with love locks ...

Bakewell is a lovely spot in the Derbyshire Dales.  It is usually packed with tourists, but as the weather was a bit dodgy it wasn't too bad ...

We had lunch in a nice pub, then carried on with our walkabout in the search of tarts ...

Aha we found them, mother popped in and bought six of them!

Not sure what's in a Huntsman Pie, but ...

.....this is an Australian huntsman!  They used to frighten me to death but they never bothered Elaine so she was the one to catch them and chuck them outside.  Boy can those buggers run fast!

Mission accomplished!

Voting and Stuff

I voted today, I won't mention who I voted for though ... C'mon the Blues!! 

It was very different from the Aussie voting experience.

In Australia when you arrive at the polling station all the different parties are outside thrusting pamphlets into your hand, trying to get you to vote for their party and if you are voting for their party they tell you how to fill out the ballot paper.  Also, there is usually a BBQ going on and it's all a bit of a party atmosphere.

Here I turned up expecting a  similar situation this morning ... how wrong I was!  The place was deserted, I was the only bugger in there!

There is one major difference, in Oz it is compulsory to vote.

Once the voting excitement was over we took mother shopping in Macclesfield.

Then we stopped off at the motorhome to see if mother would be able to climb into the bed should she join us on our travels at some point.  She has a dodgy leg and we wern't sure she would be able to climb up the steps to the back bed.

Unfortunately she climbed into the bed with no problem!

Once back at base I spread out all the old Subbuteo teams I bought back from mother's house ... I am going to flog them on eBay.

I laid them all out in their boxes and spread the pitch out with Man Utd playing Spurs but Bombo invaded the pitch and George Best disappeared up his bum!

After that fun-packed day we have retired for the evening with a very nice veggie lasagne, made by the wonderful Elaine!  

Tomorrow we have to get out of the house at 10.30 am as the Estate Agent is bringing someone round for a viewing - so we will be up at the crack of dawn!!

The Planning Starts

Just for a change we are trying to get some sort of plan together for when we leave the house on 17th June.

First up we have booked the motorhome into the Poynton camp-site from 13th June to enable us to live somewhere whilst cleaning out the house.

On Saturday 27th June we are heading off to Anglesey in the motorhome to stay on a site with a couple of friends.

On Saturday 4th July we leave Anglesey and travel down the Welsh coast to Llanfendigaid, where we will stay in the middle of nowhere for a few days.  (We stayed there once before in the previous motorhome - but hopefully we won't be getting bogged this time!)

On Wednesday 8th July we will leave for Pembrokeshire where we we will once again stay in a campsite in the middle of nowhere - this time with a water view!

View from Pembrokeshire site.

On Saturday 11th July we leave Wales and head towards London where we are booked  into the Crystal Palace site from Wednesday 15th July, so we will stay at some Britstops on the way to the best city in the World!

We leave London on 22 July and head towards Coventry to watch my favourite niece show jumping at the Stoneleigh championships.

We leave the the horsey do on Monday 27th August heading towards ... maybe Kent?  Not sure yet!


Back to the present ...

Yesterday we drove down to Milton Keynes to pick up my mother, who is staying with us for a couple of weeks.  Whilst down there we cleared out her storeroom and some cupboards to make room for our stuff that we need to put into storage.

We will soon take delivery of bits and pieces that we had stored in Australia. At least then we will have everything in this country.  We will still have to rent some storage space but hopefully it won't be too big a space as I hate spending money on storage!

The Estate Agents have also been busy booking up some viewings on the house, so we will have to keep it all clean and tidy amongst the packing and sorting!

Farewell Sis xx

Elaine's sister headed off back to Kent yesterday (Saturday).

Before we took her to the station we went for one last walk around Bolly.

We had a wander through one of the graveyards, where I noticed that this poor lad had drowned in the canal at Bollington Through Sliding on December 27th 1890. 

I guess the canal must have been frozen and the poor bugger fell through the ice!

Early afternoon we went down to Macclesfield railway station and bade farewell to Julie as she headed off home on the high speed Virgin ...

Later in the arvo I went over to the pub to watch Man Utd. but we won't go there!

Whilst I was over the pub a young girl knocked at the door and asked Elaine if she could have a look around the property sometime over the weekend, so Elaine gave her a quick tour!   It has only been on the market for a couple of days, check it out here.  It's not a bad little house, it's in a great position in the village, it has parking for two cars which is incredibly rare here.  The downside is that it is quite dark in the winter and it has no garden to speak of.

Today Elaine has started packing bits and bob s, whilst I have done a couple of little jobs on the van.